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Crystal HD Decodes New Linux Support Improvements

11-30-2013, 01:20 PM

Phoronix: Crystal HD Decodes New Linux Support Improvements

A couple years ago Broadcom released the Crystal HD as a standalone hardware video decoder chip. While there's been an open-source Linux driver for the Crystal HD, we haven't heard much about it in recent months, but that changed this morning...

I've been working on this too. I've been cleaning up the staging kernel driver and merging in the support for new hardware from the upstream crystalhd git repo. With work and spreading myself too thinly over too many projects has meant I just haven't had enough time lately to get everything done, I would like to. I'll get in touch with Guido and see if we can work together.

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Are there really enough of those chips out in the wild to justify the work? I got the impression that it wasn't used that much when the two Broadcom cards were widely available as ION was winning the market and there hasn't really been any driver work from the manufacturer for a long time when last I checked.

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Are there really enough of those chips out in the wild to justify the work? I got the impression that it wasn't used that much when the two Broadcom cards were widely available as ION was winning the market and there hasn't really been any driver work from the manufacturer for a long time when last I checked.

They still have their uses. I have an older 2006 Mac Mini that I use for one of the HTPCs (Dual Booting OS X and openSUSE). They are also pretty popular with the original AppleTV crowd. Without it those older devices would no longer be useful. I also know of a few people that repurposed their old netbook/notebook to use as a HTPC utilizing the Broadcom card.

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I have on of those cards installed in my Atom N450 based hpmini notebook. I have never had the chance to try it however. I need to jailbreak first HP evil firmware that disable the second pci extension slot and blacklist any pci device not sold by HP and I never had enough freetime to dedicate to this project....

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Are there really enough of those chips out in the wild to justify the work? I got the impression that it wasn't used that much when the two Broadcom cards were widely available as ION was winning the market and there hasn't really been any driver work from the manufacturer for a long time when last I checked.

Yeah, still useful and necessary, for those with older HTPC's. If AMD added UVD support for RS780/880, I'd be able to retire my Crystalhd, but not until then.

s_j_newbury: I would love to see 970015 support added to the staging driver.

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Yeah, still useful and necessary, for those with older HTPC's. If AMD added UVD support for RS780/880, I'd be able to retire my Crystalhd, but not until then.

s_j_newbury: I would love to see 970015 support added to the staging driver.

I do have it integrated in my local tree; but it's not yet ready to be pushed upstream. Before new hardware support is added to the in-kernel driver, I've been tasked with cleaning it up to make it suitable for promotion from the staging directory*. I have done quite a lot towards it, but I've not had time to work on it recently.

* all the tasks in the TODO file new to be completed.

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Obviously, some people still have these and are using them. Are the video player developers still supporting them and improving use in current builds? I know MPlayer does and I think I remember reading about something experimental for VLC and XbMC had some support too if I recall correctly.

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Obviously, some people still have these and are using them. Are the video player developers still supporting them and improving use in current builds? I know MPlayer does and I think I remember reading about something experimental for VLC and XbMC had some support too if I recall correctly.

This isn't really too vital (direct support) since it's also available through gstreamer and a vaapi plugin. That said; yes, the support is still there in the popular media apps, also including Totem and MythTV.